


If You're Quick, For a Kick, You Can Pick Up a Christening

by executrix



Category: Firefly
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-28
Updated: 2011-06-28
Packaged: 2017-10-20 20:04:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/216615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>So…ladies and gentlemen and Jayne, you are all invited to a wedding! Five days from now, Wee Chapel of the Crystal Candles, at the Versailles Mega Hotel.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	If You're Quick, For a Kick, You Can Pick Up a Christening

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for bree_black's "Let's Get Gay Married!" ficathon, but it ran way long.

_A wedding? What’s a wedding? It’s a prehistoric ritual,  
Followed by a honeymoon when he realizes he’s saddled with a nut and want to kill me and he should…Thank you all for the gifts and the flowers,  
Thank you all, now it’s back to the showers,  
Don’t tell Paul, but I’m not getting married today!_ (Sondheim, “Not Getting Married Today,” Company)

1.  
“I’m an old man,” the Shepherd began. Simon narrowed his eyes, knowing that he was in for *something* because Book’s statistically predictable life expectancy was in the decades. The Shepherd’s general health was good, although Simon was aware that he had accumulated a rather unclerical assortment of knife wounds and shrapnel.

“So it’s hard for me to adapt to modern ways,” Book said. “My faith teaches that the Lord calls people to different states. I was called to celibacy, but I know that’s not the path for everyone. And at first I was somewhat shocked by the Captain’s, well, choice of partner. But I believe that there is a deep and sincere affection joining you, and that the relationship has been beneficial to both you because of your complementary strengths.” (Simon translated this to mean “You’ve managed to talk him out of quite so many crimes against armed folk with itchy trigger fingers.”) “But one thing about my tradition that I still believe, is that, for those who are not called to celibacy, the Lord intends physical affection to be expressed in the married state.”

Simon put his hand over Book’s and gave it a grateful press. “I’m very touched,” he said. “Thank you. That means a lot to me. And I’m sure Malcolm would appreciate it very much if you were to hold a ceremony for us. Maybe as soon as we finish the art job on Helicarnos.” He thought that there was somebody close to home who could benefit more from that little sermon, but kept his mouth shut.

Book reflected that, intelligent as the doctor was, he certainly had a lot to learn. “Simon, I think you’d have to go fairly high up in the Parliamentary hierarchy before you found someone that our Captain would be least likely to want to officiate at his wedding.”

“Uhm. Okay. Well, what would you suggest?”

“The seed does not fall on stony ground,” the Shepherd said portentously.

2.  
Simon put the washcloths into the laundry basket, checked to see that the water was turned all the way off, and said, “Wait! Don’t go to sleep just yet.”

Mal yawned and nodded.

Simon scooted underneath the blanket held up for him. “I think I need a new suit,” he said.

“We ain’t made of money, Simon. Anyways, last time it came up—the issue of your wardrobe, I mean—you said that you could get your old one mended and brushed up, and could pass for one of them eccentric rich folks that wears their good clothes forever, long’s you got a new pair of shoes. And ain’t like you need to wear a suit that often.”

Simon took a deep breath. “Don’t reject the idea out of hand because of, because of where it came from,” he said. “Shepherd Book suggested….”

“He ain’t got a bad criminal brain for a preacher,” Mal said. “Not’s good as yours, of course. Wouldn’t want you to get huffy.”

Simon took a yet deeper breath. “He thinks that we should get married.”

Mal was silent for a moment. “Yeah, we might at that. Gotta have a real plain ring, though. Never know when you’ll be shootin’ southpaw, and it’d be one o’them ironies to widow your fella ‘cause some foofaraw got caught in the trigger guard.” He twitched at the place in the blanket that was stuck, turned over, said, “A dark blue one. Brings out your eyes,” and fell asleep.

3.  
“Are you ever sorry you got married?” Simon asked.

Wash shrugged. “Good things get better, bad get worse. Wait, I think I meant that in reverse. If you have problems, it doesn’t take them away. And there are special separate problems. There was that whole you could set your watch by Mal getting hysterical thing, but I guess he can’t make a thing out of it considering that he’s marrying you. I guess if you do make an honest man out of him, that could be a problem, unless you have some smart vocational ideas?” Simon shook his head. “I can recommend the married state heartily,” Wash said. “I mean, when you first came here, I didn’t think of you as someone I’d want to spend the rest of my life with, but then, I’m not the one who has to. Also, when you’re married, they can’t make you testify against your…against the person you’re married to.”

“Frankly, I’m not worried as much about the guys with subpoenas as the guys with blowtorches,” Simon said.

4.  
“No hard feelings,” Kaylee said, and handed Simon a floppy package wrapped in ombre tissue paper. “G’wan, open it.”

Simon carefully removed the tape and took out the chain. “Kaylee, it’s beautiful. Thank you.”

“There was some spare aluminum after I patched the burn panel on the nose,” Kaylee said. “And I thought, well, your ring is gonna be on and off, when you’re scrubbing up your hands, y’know? This way, you can keep it ‘round your neck and not have to worry about losing it.”

Simon kissed Kaylee’s cheek. “Thank you for being a good sport. I’m sorry that it…us…that it didn’t, you know, work out.”

“Lots of good fish in the sea,” said Kaylee, who was keeping company with a kind-hearted cattle rancher they met at a hootenanny in St. Alban’s. And keeping company with a rakishly handsome asteroidshiner from Lilac who occasionally shipped a few casks offworld.

5.  
“You can’t just rush in without an appointment!” said the horrified secretary in the Euphrosyne office of The Committee to Re-Elect Parliament.

Zoe’s boot heel crashed through the Cortex screen.

“Bedamn if I ain’t cleared the calendar.”

As a matter of interest, Zoe glanced at the name plate on the door, but didn’t set much store by it.

“Well, here we are again,” she said. “Two ways this could go. Mal either needs these divorce papers signed, or a death certificate. I’d vote for the second one, but you know what an old softy he is.”

6.  
Simon clicked his encyclopedia off, and the last PowerPoint slide vanished where it had been projected onto the kitchen cabinets. The crew yawned, stretched, and stamped feeling back into fallen-asleep feet.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “As you can see, none of the scenarios or sub-scenarios proves out as a usable plan. They’ve done a good job of planning their security. The risks for us are just too high. The job is larger than we can manage with our present and we haven’t done well collaborating with other, uhh, criminal organizations. I have to recommend in the strongest possible terms that we, you know, that we look for something else to do.”

Mal didn’t actually look too upset. “Zo’, what do you have to say?”

“Coulda done with a lot less of it, but the operational analysis seems right enough,” she said.

Mal turned to River. “Figure that we could go to Zetophon soon’s the paint is dry on them genuine Earth-that-Was masterpieces.”

River glared at him. “As you know, the forensic markings are impeccable!”

Mal leaned back and hooked his thumbs into his suspenders. “Might be a good thing we ain’t doin’ that casino job…” he began.

River rolled her eyes. “Because it would be so tacky to get married someplace you were trying to knock off, and you’d have to do it first, there wouldn’t be time for even a quick ceremony before the getaway.”

Mal **hated** to have his lines stepped on. “Yeah,” he said. “So…ladies and gentlemen and Jayne, you are all invited to a wedding! Five days from now, Wee Chapel of the Crystal Candles, at the Versailles Mega Hotel.”

7.  
Zoe went into Mal’s cabin, carrying something large and soft in her arms.

Mal cautiously slid the zipper open and looked inside. “Awww, Zo!” he said. “Bet Simon’s never seen one of these. Hell, been a long time since we did neither. How—where’d—you get it?”

“Got my ways,” Zoe said.

“Shoulda known that.” Mal looked down and addressed the space between his boots. “Ain’t you got work to do?”

“I’ll take that in the spirit it was intended, Sir,” Zoe said.

8.  
“All this crap about the wedding, and it’s up to me to be the one that deals with the important stuff,” Jayne said, smashing down a none-too-clean roll of papers on the dining room table. “I asked River where Saffron…well, whatever her name is…was hangin’ her hat these days. Hadda take two of her floor-polishin’ shifts just for the information, too, even though it’s so Mal can get un-hitched and marry her stupid brother.” Jayne paused, scratching his lip beneath the mustache. “So, I went and braced her. She near to split herself laughing when I told her why this needed gettin’ done. But I didn’t have to do no violent stuff or give her any money or nothin’. She just said it sat real well with her to run into a real man for a change, and one thing led to another. Dunno if Mal’s gonna thank me, though. Maybe he wants it not to stick, so soon’s he wants to show Fancy-Pants the air he can do it.”

“Captain’s on the level,” Zoe said. She reached into the drawer underneath the table and took out a much neater document. “Hmmm. Looks like she put down two more names on these ones than the ones I got two weeks back. Good to know.”

9.  
“Mal can’t find his good cufflinks,” River said. “I know you’re not supposed to see each other until the ceremony, but he wants to check off all the items on Inara’s punch list.”

“They’re on the dresser. Next to my suicide note,” Simon said. He was impeccably dressed, except that the top button on his shirt was open and he hadn’t tightened the knot on his tie. River shook her head and headed off to fetch Inara, thought better of it, and hauled in Shepherd Book.

“A mite nervous, Son?” Book asked.

“I don’t know how I can get married, anyway. River needs…so much…and I’m not helping her, I don’t know what to do even if I spent 24 hours a day on it. It’s like the girl in King Lear, you know? How can I have a husband and still love her the most? And she and Mal are going to absolutely hate being sister- and brother-in-law.”

“I’m sure the Captain has thought all of this through,” Book said. “I wonder, if you aren’t having doubts on your own behalf?”

“Yes, yes, of course, that too. I was never any good at relationships! I never kept a boyfriend through a whole training cycle! I found a note in my locker one day. The best anesthetist we had at CapCen Medicomplex didn’t just dump me. He moved to Bellerophon. Nobody in the whole Vascular Surgery department would talk to me for a month.”

“There are times when I’ve been glad I wasn’t called to the married state,” Book said. “But from what I’ve seen of married life, it is emphatically not restricted to orphaned only children in a state of perfect psychological integration.”

“Coming in for a landing, bridal party,” Wash said over the comm.

Simon glanced wildly at the door.

10.  
Simon assumed that the planet was named Vagus because it was getting on his last nerve. It was the kind of place where the terraforming, done on the cheap, was starting to chip. It didn’t have a lot of obvious tourist attractions, from which followed the erection of a number of luxurious casino complexes, because they did business by making the punters forget that a natural world existed outside, keeping them inside, frenetically gambling, buying things, and, like drunked-up people in need of either celebration or consolation everywhere, getting married.

The wedding chapel specialized in tradition. In other words, they repeated a lot of the same stuff over and over, although nobody could remember or figure out exactly why.

Mal, who hated to make the same mistake twice, had consulted Simon’s encyclopedia, and knew that, starting from the rug runner in front of the altar table, he and Simon had to walk around the table three times in opposite directions, halt in front of the altar, then switch directions and make another three cycles.

It was 9:59 am. The previous wedding party had been ceremoniously waved out of the way. The next wedding party fidgeted in the anteroom. (Like a shrink’s office, there were satellite rooms to keep one set out of view of the others.)

Simon, in his new-ish dark blue suit and a claret-colored foulard tie that was a gift from Inara, stood at the altar, with River and Shepherd Book blocking the way to the exit.

At 9:59:24, Wash hurried into place, between Inara in a purple sari heavy with gold embroidery, and Zoe, in her calf-length bias-cut midnight blue gown. Inara had brought a date, a handsome thirtyish venture capitalist who, like a number of people in the IT industry, leaned leftward politically. Inara did not mind being gracious in defeat, as long as Mal knew that there had been a conflict.

Wash was afraid that his tuxedo was more the color of pond scum, less the lime green requested, but at least the lapels were satin like her dress. He regretted almost being late, but, as he should have anticipated, there had been a line at the jewelry store where he bought the two wedding rings now burning a hole in his pocket.

The tape of the shamisens and wood blocks struck up the familiar wedding march. Kaylee danced forward, scattering rose petals that matched the flounces of her dress.

“Who giveth this man to be married?” asked the celebrant, twitching a little so his cape flowed behind him, unzipping his gleaming white jumpsuit a little, so the ankh pendant stood out. Zoe stepped forward, holding a crown. She stretched up her arms to hold it over Mal’s head. “I do,” she said. “And who giveth THIS man to be married?” asked The Viss, eyes shining behind his metal-framed sunglasses. “I do!” River said, going on pointe to hold the crown over Simon’s head. (Inara vetoed the tutu concept, so she wore a pale-blue leotard, a sarong boldly printed with bronze pineapples, and a lei of really very realistic paper orchids.)

Simon’s eyes lit up at the sight of Mal proudly walking the red carpet in his Browncoat full-dress uniform, including all his medals which, it turns out, he hadn’t thrown away after all. They stood side by side, and Mal’s eyes, already misting a little, had to be closed in the interests of image. When he looked up, he kicked himself for not remembering to get anything to decorate the Hooper. And then he saw that someone (it turned out to have been Inara) had sourced a Shadow flag to make up the canopy.

They walked. They exchanged rings. They signed the K-Tube, although it wasn’t a tube at all, just another piece of paper. The Shepherd, rather pointedly, aimed a bouquet touchdown pass at Kaylee. She was a more experienced Calvinball than football player, and it slid through her hands.

At 10:27, the door opened. Wash was the first to respond, saying, “Little late, Jayne. We just got done here.”

“Hell, no, I’m early,” Jayne said, moving aside to disclose that Saffron stood immediately behind him. “And I’m the one gettin’ done. In ‘bout three minutes.” Saffron distributed vitriolic simpers throughout the Serenity wedding party. She wore a truly remarkable dress, quite the opposite of the Emperor’s new clothes because at first glance it didn’t seem to exist, but when goggled at turned out to consist of form-fitting swirls of beige lace over a flesh-colored slip.

Jayne never minded making the same mistake over and over again if it was fun the first time. “And it all comes off when ya pull the thread!” Jayne leered. He figured that Saffron getting hitched again was like bringing poles to new assholes, but he’d worry about that after the honeymoon.

**Author's Note:**

> Musical comedy fans will note that portions of this fic are not entirely dissimilar to "Company," the film version of which I happened to see just before New York legalized same-sex marriage.


End file.
